In food industry hard surface cleaning has traditionally been carried out by high pressure foam cleaning. There are some severe safety problems by using high pressure foam cleaning: High pH, aggressive cleaning agents, aerosol formation and mechanical noise and damage are the most important ones, but there are also environmental problems connected to high pressure foam cleaning due to a large water consumption and thereby effluent treatment.
It has also been excluded to add enzymes to the detergents in the normal hard surface cleaning. The risk of inhaling enzymes (allergy potential) due to aerosol formation is so obvious that it rules out the use of enzymes in the traditional high pressure foam cleaning.
To overcome these difficulties in recent years much effort has been put into developing different hard surface cleaners in the form of gels. The gel cleaners have the advantages of giving a safe application, they do not or only insignificantly create aerosols, they have a low water consumption, so if the cleaning capacity of the gel is satisfactory, the gel application method is a safe and gentle way of cleaning hard surfaces.